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An Empirical Assessment of Organizational Commitment and Organizational Effectiveness - 2007
An Empirical Assessment of Organizational Commitment and Organizational Effectiveness - 2007
Effectiveness
Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1. (Mar., 1981), pp. 1-14.
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An Empirical Assess- Thestudy attempts to relate the organizational commitment
merit of Organizational of lower-level employees to organizational effectiveness in
organizations offering bus services. Organizational com-
Commitment and Or- mitment was found to be associated with organizational
ganizationalEffective- adaptability, turnover, and tardiness rate, but not with
ness operating costs or absenteeism. Two subscales were con-
structed to measure value commitment and commitment to
Harold L. Angle and stay in the organization. Few significant differences were
found between the subscales, as they relate to various
James L. Perry indicators of organizational effectiveness, and the overall
pattern suggested the need to avoid simplisticassumptions
about the impact of commitment on organizationally rele-
vant behavior:
METHOD
Sample and Research Sites
A total of 24 organizations, which operated fixed-route bus
services in western United States, participated in the study.
Archival and transit manager questionnaire and interview data
were collected at all participating organizations, and employee
questionnaires were administered to members of the bus
drivers' bargaining unit. Consequently, a majority (91 percent) of
the respondents were bus drivers; however, at a few of the
participating organizations, mechanics andlor clerical personnel
were included in the drivers' bargaining unit and so were
sampled along with the drivers. The total employee sample was
1244, while the transit manager sample was 96.
The nature of the bus driver's job was expected to provide a
particularly sensitive test of the relationship between the
commitment of rank-and-file employees and several indicators
of the effectiveness of their employing organizations. Driving a
bus is one of the more controlled yet one of the more
autonomous blue-collar occupations. On the one hand, drivers
must adhere rigorously to minute-by-minute schedules keyed
to a fixed route that must be followed exactly, and deviance
from these schedules has a high probability of discovery. On
the other hand, within the constraints of time and route, the
bus driver is like a ruler of a minor kingdom. Whether intended
by the organization or not, a great deal of the driver's behavior,
with respect to passenger relations, is discretionary.
For the passengers, the driver is the organization. The network
of drivers that the organization puts out on the road constitutes
the organization's public face. Ultimately, public attitudes
toward the organization, and public utilization and support of the
transit operation, may come to depend in large part on how well
the drivers represent the organization to the public. Thus, as a
true boundary-role person (Adams, 1976), the bus driver may be
in a unique position to influence organizational outcomes, by her
or his job-relevant behaviors. If these behaviors are, in any way,
a function of organizational commitment, then organizational
commitment and organizational performance might be related.
Measures
Organizational commitment. Employee commitment was
measured by the 15-item Organizational Commitment Ques-
tionnaire (OCQ) (Porter et al., 1974), which has demonstrated
good psychometric properties and has been used with a wide
range of job categories (Mowday, Steers, and Porter, 1979). In
the present study, Cronbach's alpha was .90. Two subscales
were also created, based on the results of a factor analysis:
value commitment (alpha=.89) and commitment to stay (al-
pha=.72), which appear to differentiate between the respon-
dents' commitment to support thegoals of the organization and
their commitment to retain their organizational membership.
Table 1 indicates the factor loadings and shows which items
were included in each of the subscales. As Table 1 indicates,
there was also a third factor extracted under the conventional
rule that eigenvalues equal or exceed a value of one (Nunnally,
1978); however, only one item had its highest loading on that
factor. Because single-item scales are notoriously unreliable,
only the t w o subscales mentioned were used.
In order to assess the stability of the factor structure obtained,
cross validation was achieved by randomly dividing the sample
and conducting a new pair of factor analyses. The factor-loading
patterns for these analyses were virtually identical with those
for the overall sample; thus, the factor structure appears quite
stable.
The observation that the items loading on factor 2 were all
reverse-scored, while none of the reverse-scored items were
loaded on factor 1, gave rise, initially, to the concern that the
structure obtained might have resulted from an artifact of
measurement. Although it is likely that such an artifact might
have contributed to the separation of factors, the t w o clusters
of questionnaire items appear to be conceptually distinct.
The value commitment scale includes items connoting pride in
association with the organization (i.e., identification), willing-
Organizational Commitment and Effectiveness
Table 1
Rotated Factor Loadings from Factor Analysis for the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire*
to work for.
I find that my values and the organization's values are very simllar
job performance.
~ndefin~tely
(reversed).
For me, this is the best of all organizations for which to work.
on m y part (reversed).
Eigenvalues
* Only factor loadings above .30 are shown.
** Factor 1 -value commitment; Factor 2 -commitment to stay.
t Items included in value commitment subscale.
* Items included in commitment t o stay subscale.
ness to perform for the organization, concern for the fate of the
organization, and congruence of personal values with those of
the organization. Although three of the nine items relate to
attitudes toward organizational membership, their wording
tends to imply that attachment is based on the member's
positive regard for the organization. In the aggregate, these
items indicate a form of organizational involvement, which
Etzioni (1975) termed "moral" and which is clearlyanalogous to
Stebbins' (1970b) notion of value commitment.
The commitment to stay scale includes a cluster of question-
naire items that pertain to membership in itself. Unlike the
membership-related items that load on factor 1, these items do
not connote an affective bond to the organization. On the
contrary, the wording of this set of items conveys a general
impression of Etzioni's (1975) "calculative involvement."
Organizational effectiveness. Several aspects of overall or-
ganizational effectiveness were tapped by the use of selected
performance indicators. The rationale for the selection of the
specific indicators is discussed in an earlier paper (Perry and
Angle, 1980b).
Employee turnover (separation rate) was measured by compila-
tion of statistics on voluntary termination during the preceding
fiscal year. A second turnover measure was obtained by self-
report of employees' intent to quit (Appendix),a measure which
has received substantial research support, as documented in a
recent review by Muchinsky and Tuttle (1979).
Employee tardiness was computed as the ratio of recorded
tardiness incidents to the mean number of employees during
the preceding fiscal year. Unfortunately, adequate tardiness
records had been maintained by only 14 of the 24 organizations
for which other performance data were available.
Absenteeism was obtained by self-report (Appendix).Like
tardiness, reliable absence statistics had not been maintained
by several of the participating organizations, but the alternative
measure was available through the employee questionnaire.
Operating expense was another measure of effectiveness. A
general notion of efficiency seems to be common in most
taxonomies of the dimensions of organizational effectiveness.
The broad concept of efficiency involves the computation of
ratios of inputs to outputs, or of costs to benefits. In public mass
transit, efficiency may be defined in terms of the extent to
which the organization is able to minimize operating costs,
relative both to the amount of transit service provided and to the
overall scope of the operation. Two performance indicators
were, therefore, selected for this purpose: operating expense
per revenue vehicle-hour, computed by dividing total operating
expenses for the preceding fiscal year by the total number of
operating hours for the revenue vehicles, and operating ex-
pense per employee, using the total number of employees as
the measure of input.
Organizational adaptability was measured by self-report, using a
modified version of Mott's (1972) questionnaire. A four-item
scale was constructed and incorporated in both the employee
questionnaire and the transit manager questionnaire (Appen-
dix). The adaptability of each organization was thus measured
t w o ways, i.e., by averaging the responses to the adaptability
scale separately for transit managers and for other employees.
Procedures for Data Collection
Archival data and questionnaires. Archival data were col-
lected and questionnaires administered during two-day site
visits. Employees had been made aware of the survey in
advance of each visit throug h the internal communication
systems of the organizations. All questionnaires were pre-
sented directly to participating employees by a member of the
research team. In most cases, completed questionnaires,
which were filled out anonymously, were returned directly to
one of the researchers before the conclusion of the sitevisit. In
a few cases, respondents were unable to complete question-
naires in time, and so were furnished with preaddressed,
postpaid envelopes for direct mail return to the university. In no
case did persons in the chain of authority in the organization
become involved in administering questionnaires. The re-
sponse rate for the primary method of administration (i.e.,
on-site return) was 71 percent; however, the overall response
rate dropped to 64 percent when persons w h o were provided
mail-return envelopes were included in the computation. The
response rate from mail returns alone was 32 percent.
Sampling goals were established separately for each site, in
inverse proportion to organization size. At the smallest organiza-
tions, less than 30 eligible employees, for instance, the target
Organizational Commitment and Effectiveness
RESULTS
Organizational Commitment: Subgroup Differences
Personal factors accounted for several subgroup differences.
Commitment was positively correlated with age (r=.17,
p <.001), but negatively related to educational level (p<.0001).
The results for educational level were striking, showing a
steady decline in commitment across eight ascending educa-
tional level categories. No significant differences were found,
however, across racial-ethnic subgroups or between em-
ployees whose income was or was not the primary source of
family support.
The relationships of age and of educational level with commit-
ment were generally consistent with findings from related
research (Sheldon, 1971 ; Hrebiniak and Alutto, 1972; Steers.
1977a; Stevens, Beyer, and Trice, 1978).The argument often
used to explain these relationships is that increasing age and
decreasing levels of education tend to reduce the feasibility of
obtaining desirable alternative education and therefore tend to
restrict the individual to the present organization.
Females were more strongly committed to their organizations
than males (p<.001). While this finding was consistent with
research that has treated commitment as an instrumental
attachment to organizational membership (Hrebiniak and
Alutto, 1972), it had not been expected in the present study,
since the OCQ appears to tap a form of commitment that is
conceptually very close to work involvement (Dubin, Cham-
poux, and Porter, 1975) and, historically, women have been less
involved than men in their work (Department of Health, Educa-
tion, and Welfare, 1973; Taveggia and Ziemba, 1978).The
rationale usually presented for such findings is that females
enjoy less interorganizational mobility than males and, there-
fore, tend to become restricted to their present organizations. In
the present research, demographic differences alone would
have predicted higher commitment for males. Male employees
were older and had longer organizational tenure than females.
There were no significant sex differences in educational levels.
Measures of Organizational Effectiveness
Correlational analysis was the principal method used to assess
organizational-level relationships. Pearson correlation coeffi-
cients were computed where marginal distributions were
symmetrical and unimodal; however, forvariables with skewed
distributions, nonparametric correlations were substituted for
Pearson correlations. lntercorrelations among the effective-
ness indicators are provided in Table 2 . All variables in Table 2
were measured at the organizational level; thus, the self-report
measures consisted of the arithmetic mean of responses to
questionnaires within each participating organization.
Table 2
Indicators*
1 Manager-perceived adaptability
2 . Employee-perceived adaptability
3. Absenteeism
4. Intent to quit
5. Separation rate
6. Tardiness
7. Operating expenselrevenue
vehicle hour
8. Operating expenselemployee
-~-
*Pearson correlation coefficients are underlined; all others are Spearman rho.
*p<.05; **p<.01; ***p<.001.
Table 3
Manager-perceived 24 .I 6
- -
.I5 -
.I7 02
adaptability
DISCUSSION
This research was designed to find systematic relationships
between members' commitment to their work organizations
and several indices of organizational effectiveness. The results
were rather mixed. The pattern of relations hips s hown in Table
3 for the two commitment subscales perhaps provides one clue
as to why the overall commitment-effectiveness relationships
were not as strong as had been anticipated. Although none of
the relationships was statistically significant, the two operating
expense ratios showed a tendency toward a stronger associa-
tion with value commitment than with commitment to stay,
whereas the turnover measures were more clearly related to
commitment to stay. This pattern suggests that any impact of
employee commitment on the organization may indeed depend
on the specific kinds of behaviors to which the employees are
committed and, of course, the effects of such behaviors on
organizational outcomes.
In keeping with earlier research (Porter et al., 1974; Steers,
1977a; Koch and Steers, 1978), the clearest evidence provided
by the present study is that there is an inverse relationship
between organizational commitment and employee turnover.
As Steers (1977a) pointed out, such a finding is not surprising,
considering Porter's definition of commitment (Porter et al.,
1974). However, a strong desire to remain a member of one's
1 organization does not automatically imply that there is also an
It is acknowledged that the significance of intention to be a dependable and hardworking employee. In
the difference between two correlation
coefficients, neither of which is statistically terms of Harris and Eoyang's (1977) typology, organizational
significant, is difficult to interpret. How- outcomes would probably vary, depending on which quadrant
ever, the fact that a correlation could have
occurred by chance does not mean that the
includes the preponderance of employees whoare in a position
correlation equals zero. In this instance, the to influence the performance of the organization. For instance,
larger of each pair of correlations related to if most such employees had a strong intention to remain but
operating expense is nearly significant
(p<.081. Furthermore, the test forthe
low motivation to contribute their best efforts toward the
equallty of two dependent correlations mission (i.e., passive commitment), there would be no reason
takes intoaccount, simultaneously, the size to expect a simple, linear relationship between organizational
of each correlation and the degrees of
freedom. Accordingly, there appears to be commitment and overall organizational effectiveness-particu-
some justtfication for reporting statistical larly in cases where turnover appears to have little direct impact
significance, when found. On the other
hand, the issue is controversial, and the
on other aspects of organizational performance. As Table 2
data are offered with due caution. indicates, the turnover measures appeared virtually unrelated to
Organizational Commitment and Effectiveness
operating costs, and the probable reasons for this have been
discussed in an earlier paper (Perry and Angle, 1980a).
The overall pattern in Table 3 seems consistent with Harris and
Eoyang's (1977) notion that commitment to stay and commit-
ment to work are Independent constructs and, in combination,
have complex implications for organlzatlons. However, the
table shows fewer statistically significant relationships than
might be desired, and there are some anomalies. For instance,
although there is no significant difference between the correla-
tions for employee-perceived adaptability and the two com-
mitment subscales, the trend IS in a counterintuitive direction.
Indeed, the largest correlation in Table 3 is between
employee-perceived adaptability and commitment to stay.
It would seem unlikely that a linear relationship should exist
betweenany form of commitment and organizational adaptabil-
ity. At the extreme, commitment would appear to milltate
against the individual's (and therefore the organization's) ability
to adapt to change (Salancik, 1977). It is more likely that, with
respect to adaptability, there is some optimal level of commit-
ment - sufficient to evoke needed employee behaviors be-
yond expliclt role stipulations, but not so strong as to incur the
suspension of individual judgment In favor of organizational
precepts
As an additional note on the number of nonsignificant relation-
ships in Table 3, it should be recognized that this study
represents an attempt to find systematic relationships in a
"noisy system." As is often the case with field research, there
are a number of uncontrolled variables. In particular, such
performance measures as operating expense ratios are subject
to many influences besides the motivation of lower-level
employees. Management competence, structural and
technological variables, and various contextual factors combine
to place limits on any potential effort-performance relationship.
Two cautions are required. The first is about the cross-sectional
nature of the research. To the extent that Table 3 does show
relationships between commitment and indicators of organiza-
tional effectiveness, the directionality of the causal arrow has
still not been established. For example, however logical a case
might be made that some optimal level of employee commit-
ment might foster organizational adaptability, there is the
possibility that organizations that are adaptable either induce
commitment in their members or tend to attract and retain a
disproportionate share of committed types of employees.
The second caution is about occupational specificity. As Salan-
cik (1977) pointed out, the impact of employee commitment on
an organization depends, not only on what the employees are
committed to do, but also on what the potential is for those
specific behaviors to influence organizational outcomes. In the
present research, for example, commitment to stay was shown
to have a more clear-cut relationship to voluntary turnover than
to such indicators as operating costs. This may reflect the ready
availability of a replacement labor pool and relatively modest
training costs in the transit industry. In an industry where
labor-pool and technological considerations would combine to
make turnover particularly expensive, commitment to stay
might exert a more powerful impact on operating costs, though
indirectly.
CONCLUSION
The present research offered an opportunity to uncover a
commitment-performance relationship, if such a relationship
exists, through cross-organizational comparison of commit-
ment levels relative to performance measures within a single
type of service organization. Furthermore, there were reasons
to expect that the role of bus operator was such that a
behavior-performance link might, indeed, exist.
What the research most clearly accomplished was a construc-
tive replication of a relatively large body of earlier work, showing
a definite negative relationship between organizational com-
mitment and voluntary turnover. Beyond that issue, the results
were rather mixed. The statistics that could most nearly be
considered bottom-line indicators f o r t he organizations that
participated in the research were the two operating expense
ratios, yet these aspects of organizational performance were
not significantly associated with organizational commitment.
Although employee-perceived organizational adaptability was
associated with commitment, manager-perceived adaptability
was not. The relationship between tardiness and commitment
was significant; however, employee tardiness rate was not
significantly associated with organizational operating costs.
The overall pattern of relationships between various perform-
ance indicators and the two commitment subscales, though
inconclusive, suggests follow-up research. The relationship
between commitment and behavior very likely depends on the
form that commitment takes. Ratherthan assuming a simplistic
relationship between commitment and positive performance
outcomes, organizational researchers will have to begin to deal
with more complex factors.
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Intent to quit
1. I intend to stay until I retire.
2. 1 will leave only if an exceptional opportunity turns up.
3. 1 will leave if something better turns up.
4. 1 intend to leave as soon as possible.
Absenteeism How many workdays were you absent from work in the last year (do not count v a c a t l o n ) ? d a y s .
Adaptability A scale was constructed from the following four questions (Alpha=.80). Responses were obtalned on a
7-point summated rating scale with anchor words ranging from "strongly disagree" (1)to "strongly
agree" ( 7 ) :
1. People In this organization do a good job anticipating problems.
2. People in this organization doa good job in keeping up wlth changes in new equipment and new ways
of doing things.
3. When changes are made in routlnes and equipment, people adjust to these changes qulckly.
4. People in this organization do a good job coping with emergency situations brought on by accidents.
equipment and labor problems, or other factors that might cause temporary work overloads.
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References
Review: [Untitled]
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Prediction of Organizational Behavior by Norman Frederiksen; Ollie Jensen; Albert E. Beaton;
Bruce Bloxom
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Central Life Interests and Organizational Commitment of Blue-Collar and Clerical Workers
Robert Dubin; Joseph E. Champoux; Lyman W. Porter
Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 3. (Sep., 1975), pp. 411-421.
Stable URL:
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